Excuse me but, I'm not build on alienating anyone. I'm a mod since last year and I've started pixelling in 2019. I don't care about things that happened over 10 years ago I want to be part of pixel art community as it is now. There is nothing wrong in having a gallery of only pixel art, aspecially when there is no other place like that. We can talk about definitions, how different types of them work and which ones serve what functions, how they coevolve with art practice and how their usage adapts over time, but I know this topic was mauled here many times recently and back then. Now, if you have "lost" your firends becasue they were not allowed to post NPA on a gallery clearly only about PA, than they probably were not your friends in the first place. I'm against bullying and if there actually were decissive people who supported bullying, then where are they now? Oh, they are not here anymore? That probably means something. But "NPA spotter award" is not about bullying but about helping a small group of hobbyist mods to keep the PA gallery a PA gallery. Bullies can use "like" or "retweet" buttons for bullying. Limiting our tools is not a way to fight bullies. If you are so much against hate please stop wasting your energy on a decade old grudge, and use it to help the community get rid of all the faults you see in it instead of just pointing them (even if most of those points are just false), becasue I belive you have left here for some reason other than ruminating about past in the chatterbox. We are now positive and focused on the future. Everyone is encouraged to participate in our thriving community. This means you too greenraven. If you are one of the Jal's scholars, please share with us the art you made thanks to his guidance. Please share your experience commenting art of others. And use your commenting energy to motivate users - if you feel we are not doing that enough it means that your help in that matter would be very useful. And please join our collabs as there are many, contrary to your believes. If you cannot use discord and you are nostalgic about forum you can always join the current iso collab. I've never meet Jal but if he was such a wonderful teacher I would love to see your tiles. This time we have a carnival/theme park/circus topic.
Yes, purges, really. That's neither an exaggeration nor a hyperbole. This new community was built on alienating a large portion of the old community.
If you want to know PixelJoint's true legacy and not the comfortable lie that most people live with today then I suggest you dig through the admin action logs. You'll see the period where hundreds of thousands of pieces were scrubbed from the site and the artists were told to "post your shit somewhere else". And then they started handing out those "NPA Spotter" awards to encourage bullying and harassment for those that still did pixels the "wrong" way.
I still remember all the friends I lost.
Anyway this was only supposed to be a quick comment about jal and has spiraled into something else entirely different.
The problem is that pixel purity was an extremist outlier ideology that the younger members mistook as gospel. If you repeat a lie long enough it will be indistinguishable from the truth. When the purges started to happened that just reaffirmed for some that "this is the one true way", which it's not, it's just PJ's way.
Okay, so this is about how you define pixel art, or at least how you don't define pixel art. You're framing the situation as there being one truth - I believe that talking about truth for a subject matter like art is fallacious.
I think it's a lot healthier and productive to have multiple perspectives on how one would define pixel art, and to engage in that discussion, to challenge those notions, either strengthening them, adapting them or even changing them. Striving for inclusivity and flexibility works in that direction.
What do you mean by "pixel purity"? Why do you qualify it as an extremist outlier ideology? I'm pretty sure I remembered the late 2000s/early 2010s being a time when pixel art was being defined as a medium, and as such, there was discussion around what its specificities were.
Also, purges? Really?? That's pushing it.
I joined PJ in 2010, been modding over 9 years now, so I don't know that 2007-8 you're talking about. But since 2010, if anything has changed about PJ, it's WAY more active (including Discord but why not?) and we're just a bunch of people trying to keep it that way. We're all busy people IRL, the site doesn't even belong to us but we still produce ideas, projects, contests, keep daily and weekly routines and choires... Only because we love pixel art and we want it to have a specialized portal and not just be buried in the ocean of social media. This is the only place that you can search for the works of thousands of artists from years back. We aren't asking for praise, but help is more welcome than harsh criticism :)
I wasn't even here when the old artists were "chased away" as you call it, so current mods won't take the blame for it. I have actually been stalking new artists on twitter and facebook and telling them to post their work on PJ for years, I'm sure many of us are doing the same.
Ens and Blink, yeah, they started the trend. Jal and I were always opposed to it.
The problem is that pixel purity was an extremist outlier ideology that the younger members mistook as gospel. If you repeat a lie long enough it will be indistinguishable from the truth. When the purges started to happened that just reaffirmed for some that "this is the one true way", which it's not, it's just PJ's way.
I'm tempted to put that claim of "inclusive and flexible" to the test by submitting my oekaki and voxels. 
old man keeps telling the youngsters how much the world used to be better back in the day.
then proceeds to blame them for screwing everything up.
youngsters back in the day: not even born yet.
world back in the day: dumpster fire.
I'm sorry but wouldn't the blame for that go to Ens and Jal in that case? The people that actually were admins at the time. If anything I'd say PJ has become way more inclusive and flexible in recent years.
As passionate as many of the old mods were there was also a way shittier attitude, especially Ens could be downright vindictive and agressive. I'm very happy with our current crop of mods and the work they do.
"But overall, I think this community and site deserves more praise than criticism."
I'll give this place all the praise it wants when you guys bring back all those LucasArts, Sierra, Silcon Knights, MicroProse, and Westwood artists you chased away during the purity purges and apologize to them for lecturing them about what "is and isn't" pixel art. These people were creating pixels long before most of us were even born, I think they know what is and isn't pixel art.
As for the rest of it like I said I don't hang around on discord much, I'm only looking at the site at face value, so I'll take your word on it.
Also not to rain on your parade about livestreams but Frankie was doing livestreams before most people even knew what Twitch was.
Anyway, people asked me what the old times were like and I gave them an answer, carry on.
Pixelween was epic.
Chatterbox < Discord < Forum < Street collab Metaverse with haptic gloves
i honestly can't wait for this year's pixelween. the last one was so much work fun!
ah my favorite chatterbox! Who's ready for the metaverse! killmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Talk about being selfless, amongst other things Hapiel hadn't even mentioned the immensely popular and successful Pixelween 2020 & Pixelween 2021 which he put together, and has helped bring several pixel art communities together!
Edit: Hapiel did mention it, but credit goes to him, nevertheless
If it's just for selling art, there's no need for NFTs. The essence of NFT is virtual currency of different denominations, and the picture is just the packaging of this currency. Artists may benefit from NFTs, but NFTs have nothing to do with artists.
I don't know if its a language barrier thing but you have a very naive and simplistic view of NFTs. Of course they can be profitable for the individual, that is not in question by any critic of them, it is that the "system" requires losers left when the few winners cash out before the whole thing crumbles. You speak of Fool's art but take a look at the quality of the average pixelart NFT and think about if "art" has anything to do with it. A NFT is just a link to a picture, the "art" aspect of NFTs is just hype to cover the fact that it is just a pyramid scheme. Also I advice you to look up the word "greenwashing".
I'm sure there's a good spanish language critique of NFTs for you to look into. If something seems "to good to be true", well it probably is. Best of luck.
Yeah except I pointed to an award I got, and let me throw in one of the earlier awards you got-
When was the last time someone received one of those? Where is the charm? Where is the personality? Most awards now are "top commenter", "most pixels", very dry and corporate.
Also I didn't say "valuable" I said "sense of community" two very different concepts.
I do clean ntfs (non-polluting), and I sell it, it has been very beneficial for me, and people really like to collect my art, in fact they resell and treasure them, in my case it was a really great experience!
They allow me to live from my art, in a much more comfortable way than if I had to do the traditional commissions
just imagine that fool designs a unique work of art to be sold as nft, and if you get that work, it would be very valuable, and if you want to sell, and if you sell it, you could get more money than you invested, and the artist would receive royalties for each resale, for life.
for me it sounds very good
I have a mountian of unfinished art, lost the motivation to keep working on them when I realized I have nowhere to post them and no one to share them with. I do oekaki and other "impure" things so my heresy isn't particularly welcomed here on pixeljoint, never really much cared for deviantart, and I'm pretty sure they'll shoot me on sight at places like pixelation after all bullshit wars that happened between all the art sites.
Also NFTs are a scam. It's artificial scarcity without any justifiable explanation. Might as well charge people money for dirt.
Yeah, I've been thinking about just putting all the random scraps of drawings I have together and finishing them one by one. The more I procrastinate on that the more daunting it becomes though haha
definitely. i've got plenty of works waiting to be finished. most of them won't be ever done.
I have a bunch of unfinished artworks now.. anyone relate?
I have encountered it a few times, and I have rejected it. And friends are not recommended to participate in NFT.
It's irritating that a lot of people hide their use when they hire pixel artists, trying to get a lot of pixel art for a very low price.
So I hate NFTs, at least those who sell NFTs.
It's been a year since I joined PJ, and I don't know why I didn't turn into a Cuttlefish, but I still want to congratulate myself in the chat room.
To be honest I don't really hang out on discord all that much. Maybe that's where all the cool kids are these days.
But the site itself just feels cold and coporate. I dunno, a lot of little things just feel off.
Ens for example had a web hosting service back in the day, you'd have to pay decent amount of cash especially back then, but Ens just gave PJ people their own slice of the internet just because. "You get an internets! And you get an internets!"
https://pixeljoint.com/projects/thejoint/default.asp?cat=2286
https://pixeljoint.com/projects/lildudes/
Maybe I'm not logging in enough or maybe I'm not looking in the right places but I don't really see site-wide projects anymore. Don't remember the last time I saw a fadatar either.
The chatterbox was an unfiltered deluge of thoughts. We didn't just talk about pixels we talked about anything and everything. Sex, drugs, love, depression, suicide, school, work, moodswings. And especially when Ens and Aleiav were on it was all "fuck this shit that motherfucking cobblewonker twatwaffles". The overall vibe just felt different when people talked here.
And when people were having trouble with challenges and wips jal, leel, and a few other site cheerleaders would jump in for moral support. Not just provide technical support on how to pixel but tell people that "it's ok, you got this, don't stress out, maybe go get some fresh air and try again later". And jal would personally go the extra mile and have a heart to heart with anyone who was struggling hard.
I dunno maybe I'm just getting old and jaded but a lot of little things just feel out of place now. It's the small stuff that you notice the most.
As it happens, my latest gallery submission is an homage to the PJ community from back in the day. I certainly feel like things were different, but it's not for me to say if it was better or worse. Depends on one's perspective and ideals. And it's not just about PJ, it's about how the internet and internet culture has changed as a whole. Compare current FB with early FB, or compare Reddit with 2005-era message boards.
Yeah, I am curious what the community was more like back in the day. Today I think the community is fairly close and I recognize quite a few of the regulars, particularly in the Discord server.
Kind of a shame that modern day pixeljoint doesn't have the same sense of community that jal fostered.
Could you elaborate?
Someone surpassed jal?! Not on my watch!!
I mean I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm actually surprised he was up that long to begin with. But I suppose there's a reason he was called the people's mod in the first place. Kind of a shame that modern day pixeljoint doesn't have the same sense of community that jal fostered.
I have no problem with that and it's good to know that there are like minded folk here. Without wanting to sound like a blowhard, I find it tacky and boring, not to mention the other more murky concerns that come with the whole meta industry. For my part I won't bring it up again, but your answer actually made me happy.
i think the good illustration of the general sentiment is the fact that in pj discord server the bot will tell you to change the subject if you even mention NFT :D
Every single day lately I get people wanting to hire me to do their NFT collections for them. I think I worked one once and found it quite mind numbing. Not to mention I don't quite know where I stand with the whole NFT thing anyway. What do you guys think of it?
Some years ago the points weighing changed, going from 3 points per comment to 5 points per comment. And since Jal left a looooott of comments, this played very much in his favor!
He still has nearly twice as many comments as I do.
Wait, Jal was first this whole time and hasnt been active in like a decade?! That's crazy. Congrats but holy heck Jal needs a reward for that! Wherever he may be <3
I was moderator here years ago, we were very strict with what we considered pixel art. Kinda crazy we wouldn't allow these through though.
I was wondering when it would happen! Congrats!
Definitely feels a little bittersweet with jal; also very impressive that he stayed on top for so many years after not being active
Yeah. I can definitely understand that low color counts are basically what helps to define pixel art, but I also think it's good when a work goes against the "standard" and still works just as great if not even better. I get it when people go "hey this has more colors than you really need, you can trim them down and still get the same result" but not when they go "hey this looks amazing but that's too many colors to be considered pixel art imo". It makes me kind of feel like it stifles the creative freedom of artists that do know what they're doing with all those colors. I don't remember what it was like years ago but I'm glad there's some leniency now.
"It basically reinforces the idea that pixel art "has" to have limited colors..." yes and there's plenty of people who will tell you that it is one of the core characteristics of pixel art.
to be fair, from what i've heard moderators used to be much more strict about gallery rules than nowadays. they are actually pretty lenient now (which imo is a good thing).
Tbf, I think rejecting works merely because they have a lot of colors is pretty dumb. I mean it can lead to a mess of a palette that could've benefitted with having a lesser color count... But if it still works even with (and especially because of) a lot of colors, then I can't see why it should be turned down. It basically reinforces the idea that pixel art "has" to have limited colors when the hall of fame literally has images containing a color count so high that had they been submitted today, they'd probably be instantly rejected based on these standards despite the stunning detail and the amount of work that went into them. For me, a high color count =/= bad and it can work if the artist knows what they're doing... Shame the effort wasn't recognized in the same way.
this is paul's second account. works posted under his other account are much older. i guess he forgot the password.
as for the rejections, i tend to think the reason was the high amount of colours used. that's always controversial issue here.
i too wish he was active on pj, but considering that he stopped posting in 2009 only to return in 2016 and apparently get most of his work rejected, i can imagine he might feel a bit of resentment. i'd say not much can be done now.
Oh huh is that what happened? I didn't even notice the upload dates. I thought it was a long-time artist and I was wondering why his work was rejected. From the looks of the preview images, at least some of them don't look like they had any valid reason for rejection... 
@Pixelarg: There is a way! I assume there's an equivalent method in every browser, but in Firefox you can bring up the page info and, in the metadata, there's a field called 'og:image'. Next to that is the URL for the picture.
See here for a screenshot.
The controversy over the resubmitting of Paul's work go to my burden. While reviewing his works, I noticed that some of them were unfairly rejected. As a moderator, I have the opportunity to push such works again. It would be a real shame for such great works to be forgotten and discarded in the past. Young pixel artists should be familiar with the fantastic work of Paul Robertson.
it would be nice if the pixel arts under review could still be seen 
Yeah, I was bummed to find out he didn't resubmit this himself either.. 
Was about to say wow Paul is back and super active! but ya'll just approved his stuff now?! :P
Hi Chatterboxers! I hope you are one pixel closer to finishing your project!
It worked, I did see it on the front page just now! 
(nowadays the frontpage cycles through different works).
... This is unfortunate. When I updated the preview I must've forgotten to optimize it...
"all the little details"
It's under 25kb now, for what it's worth :T
Yes, it did not show up on the front page, the image was over 25 kb.. :(
I hate to make the same type of message again; But I think my newest pixelart piece has been suppressed again.
Thankfully I think I know what the trigger that is causing this to happen is, but nonetheless: I've noticed that my submission "Wind Tunnel", had never made it to the new pixelart section despite being approved. And some of the work of those who have uploaded after I have, is being presently featured.
PS: I think the trigger is modifying/editing the upload prior to it being approved. I updated both the preview and the main file about an hour after I had uploaded it because I noticed something that I had remembered being animated was not moving
yeah, what i did was i cropped the file a little bit so it went below the limit. :|
but if that's not an option, you can at least post a link to animation in description.
i checked the file i couldn't upload before and it seems like 2MB
@luca: just a guess, but isn't that file over the size limit? i think it happened to me once as well.
Heyo.
So I encountered a minor problem.
I'm trying to post a new piece but no matter what I do, it shows preview pic as the main one. Help anyone? :D
Now if you really wanted a challenge, you could try to catch up to Fool's awards. 
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You say you miss the old days of PJ and then you talk about thousands of people being chased away from the site in the same old days.
Btw, some people discussing here are either equally long or even longer time members than you are and nobody's backing up this "hundreds of thousands of pieces were scrubbed from the site" thing so I'm having a hard time believing you. Sure, a few people must have been scared off from the site but I'm not sure there ever was an organized purge.